About
I'm a W3 (tenured) Professor of Computational Cognitive Science at TU Darmstadt and PI of the Human and Machine Cognition Lab.
Originally trained in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, I pivoted to cognitive science via a M.Sc. from the University of Vienna and a PhD in Psychology from Humboldt University of Berlin, while based at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Previously, I was an independent group leader at the University of Tübingen, and before that I was a postdoc at Harvard University working with Fiery Cushman and Sam Gershman.
My research is primarily concerned with understanding how people learn under uncertainty. Whereas optimal solutions are generally unobtainable in real-world environments, humans are able to learn with unrivaled robustness and efficiency. How do people take overwhelmingly rich and complex problems and transform them into compressed representations that facilitate rapid inference and generalization?
My work uses a combination of statistical and machine learning models to uncover the computational principles behind human learning and inference. I also often use biologically inspired multi-agent systems for studying social learning and collective intelligence. My work has so far focused on two main branches of learning: efficient exploration guided by generalization, and learning from others in a social environment.
You can download my CV here (last updated March 5th, 2026.
Open positions
For open positions, please visit my lab website
Contact
Email : - charley.wu[at]tu-darmstadt[dot]de
Charley M. Wu
TU Darmstadt, Department of Human Sciences, Landwehrstraße 50A, 64293 Darmstadt